This was Gaddis’s first novel published
when he was 32 and more than 40 years on it is at the very heart of his
enviable literary reputation. It has now come to be seen as a Janus-faced
text that looks back in its complexity to the great Modernists of the
inter-war years such as Joyce and Faulkner and forward to the post-war
American writers such as Barth, Coover, Pynchon, De Lillo and Gass in
its taste for black humor, literary play and absurdity. It has established
itself as a unique and influential novel, a pivotal work that makes connections
between Modernism and what has come to be called Postmodernism, both as
a literary style and as a philosophical position.

Gaddis’s first novel takes the form of a quest.
In a carefully wrought and densely-woven series of plots involving upwards
of fifty characters across three continents, we follow the adventures
of Wyatt Gwyon, son of a clergyman who rejects the ministry in favor
of the call of the artist. His quest is to make sense of contemporary
reality, to find significance and some form of order in the world.
Through the pursuit of art he hopes to find truth.His initial “failure” as an artist leads him not to copy but
to paint in the style of the past masters, those who had found in their
own time and in their own style the kind of order and beauty for which
Wyatt is looking.His talent
for forgery is exploited by a group of unscrupulous art critics and
businessmen who hope to profit by passing his works off as original
old masters. As the novel
develops, these art forgeries become a profound metaphor for all kinds
of other frauds, counterfeits and fakery: the aesthetic, scientific,
religious, sexual and personal. Towards the end, Wyatt wrenches
something authentic from what Eliot called “the immense panorama of
futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”The nature of his revelation, however is highly ambiguous and
is hedged about by images of madness and hallucination, which disturbs
simple distinctions between real and authentic, between faiths and fakes.

A strikingly original novel, it gains a number of its effects from
the dense web of literary allusions it employs, drawing upon the religious
texts of American Calvinism and European Catholicism and to a wide range
of literary and philosophical writings in the western tradition from
Aristotle to Goethe and TS Eliot. Ostensibly, the novel charts
Wyatt’s career as he negotiates the snares of the fallen modern world,
but on a further level we see how he is identified with a whole series
of literary figures, from Orpheus to Faust.While the novel is an immensely rewarding read at the level of
realism, it gains in depth and resonance when the reader can see the
allusions at work and the parallels being drawn.